1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a recording and replaying apparatus for use in a telephone system, and in particular to a method and an apparatus which are capable of recording audio messages of a plurality of callers and thereafter replaying the recorded messages.
2. Description of the Related Art
There have been widely used telephones with an automatic answering/recording function. By setting such a telephone to an automatic answering/recording mode, speech messages of callers are recorded in time sequence and thereafter can be replayed in the same order. Such a reproduction scheme, however, has a disadvantage that it is difficult to do immediate access to a desired caller because the sequentially received messages are replayed in the same order. In the case where the same caller made a call several times, these messages may be separately recorded with other messages sandwiched between them, resulting in difficulties in understanding the messages of the same caller.
To directly replay the message of a specific caller, there has been proposed a telephone with automatic answering/recording function in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 3-112246. According to the conventional telephone, the telephone numbers and the names of the callers are displayed on screen and the user selects a desired one therefrom to replay the recorded message. Therefore, instant access to a desired caller""s message can be done.
However, in the case where the same caller made a call several times and these messages are separately recorded with other messages sandwiched between them, a user""s selection instruction is needed to select each of the messages. Therefore, the conventional telephone also has difficulty in understanding the messages of the same caller.
An object of the present invention is to provide message recording and replaying method and apparatus, which can easily understand the separately received messages from each caller.
According to the present invention, an apparatus for recording and replaying a message received from a calling party through a telephone line, is provided with a memory for storing a plurality of messages received from a plurality of calling parties and a replay controller for replaying the messages stored in the memory in calling parties using caller information for each of the calling parties. Therefore, the received messages can be continuously replayed for each of calling parties.
The replay controller may count incoming calls or messages for each of the calling parties and replays messages for a calling. party selected from the calling parties in descending order of incoming call count or message count. In other words, highest priority is given to messages of a calling party having the greatest incoming call count or message count and these messages are first replayed.